HBS Digital Initiative builds community and expertise around digital transformation and tech at Harvard Business School and beyond. We manage this forum to gather and share perspectives from the HBS student community.

Wendy Chiang's Profile

Wendy Chiang

Submitted Assignment

Industry Background and Transformation For small and medium enterprises owning physical shops, point-of-sales (POS) systems along with payment systems are crucial technologies that support the whole operations. Before the digitalized POS system emerged, most shops in the United States used [...]

TikTok's special algorithms that allow everyone potentially to be famous and its easy-to-make videos features make it go viral among teenagers - just like its videos on the platform. And, It is still rapidly growing all around the world.

Activity Feed

Thanks for writing such a concise and insightful article! It’s a very special but smart strategy to align with Amazon then to compete. I am also very impressed by the whole partner ecosystem. I like how Shopify carefully turn all the major threats and competition into strategic partners.

Thanks for writing this. I enjoyed reading the passage a lot. Cornershop seems to have a promising future and the problem it is solving is surely a pain for a lot people including me. One concern I have is that since it is acquired by Walmart, it may affect its partnership with other shops who regard Walmart as a competitor.

It’s really nice to read the blog since I did not even know Plaid before reading this. Similar to the question raised in previous comments, I am interested in how Plaid tackled with the “chicken-and-egg problem”. Is it because Plaid does not need to link customers and banks on the platform given a customer is already a bank user? Also, I am curious about how Plaid makes money. It does not look like a profitable business from current setting.

Indeed, this is definitely the critical problem that TikTok needs to deal with. Here are two thoughts that I think TikTok may lean toward in the future. First, TikTok may include a larger age groups by its nature. As some studies (https://walkthechat.com/douyin-became-chinas-top-short-video-app-500-days/) has shown, though TikTok started from younger people, its user ages have actually evolved to include older people. I went on TikTok for this post for two days and did see some older people (age over 30) posing funny videos that went viral on the platform. Second, TikTok can produce other entertaining social networking apps given its huge user base and rich user data. People can migrate from TikTok as they grow older. Finally, I agree with your to capitalize now for short-term revenue and I think that is what TikTok is currently doing.

Indeed, this is definitely the critical problem that TikTok needs to deal with. Here are two thoughts that I think TikTok may lean toward in the future. First, TikTok may include a larger age groups by its nature. As some studies (https://walkthechat.com/douyin-became-chinas-top-short-video-app-500-days/) has shown, though TikTok started from younger people, its user ages have actually evolved to include older people. I went on TikTok for this post for two days and did see some older people (age over 30) posing funny videos that went viral on the platform. Second, TikTok can produce other entertaining social networking apps given its huge user base and rich user data. People can migrate from TikTok as they grow older. Finally, I agree with your to capitalize now for short-term revenue and I think that is what TikTok is currently doing.